While you are breaking your head over trying to understand the complex algorithm of Google and trying to find some golden ways of understanding its standards to rank a website in its SERPs, you might just be missing out on a crucial aspect of Search Engine Optimization. It might not have occurred to you, but competition analysis is as important as trying to find SEO techniques to get your website on the top ranks. This is not just exclusive to SEO, but to almost every aspect of your life where you are trying to best your competitors. If you do not study the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, how can you even hope to outrank them? Understanding is the key to success. You need to understand all those in the race with you, as much as you should understand yourself.
When speaking about the topic of SEO, it is essential that you understand the motives of your competitors. You need to analyze the strengths they play by and try to investigate into the flaws of their websites. That is the only way you can beat them and outrank them on the Search Engines Results Page. We are going to go through some of the basic rules by which you can perform this analysis. Check what Sir Linksalot has got to say regarding competition analysis and see what course of action they suggest to go about the same.
Why Is Competition Analysis So Crucial?
Even before you decide on getting that website up and running, you need to check your competitors’ websites. Now, this process is of crucial importance because of the following reasons-
- You can get an overview of what exactly the site enfolds.
- You can check for the quality and number of backlinks that the websites have.
- You can check if there are websites whose ranking is unbeatable (read: government websites).
- You can understand the page authority and see for yourself the exact places where you can best your competitors’ websites.
Stop and See If The Rankings Are Unbeatable:
Competition analysis might arm you with an arsenal wherein you can knock other websites off their top ranks. But, the other thing it informs you about is if you are up against unbeatable websites. Government websites like that of army, navy or air force and sites like Wikipedia are always unmatched. That is because they shall always rank for all the keywords relevant in their niche. There is no beating them, at least not in the near future. Thus, it would be foolish of you to waste your time over these websites. You need to move on and check for other niches.
Analyze the Page Authority and Backlinks:
Backlinks rule the domain of SEO. The higher the number of backlinks a website has, the greater would be its page authority. Therefore, an important and non-negotiable step to competition analysis is to check for a website’s quality and the number of backlinks. So, how do you go about doing that? You use a tool, probably the best in the market, known as Ahrefs to this endeavour. All you have to do is place the website’s URL in the tool (there is a space for that) and then select the options from the taskbar it contains to do the needful. Ahrefs will furnish you with the URL Rating (UR), the Domain Rating (DR), and the Referring Domains (RD). These are the factors that will give you the hang of how authoritative a site is. You can also check the number of backlinks it has and the sites from which it gets those. Therefore, if you find any room for being better than your competitors in these aspects, you can easily devise efficient ways.
Analyze the On-Page Optimization Factors:
On-page optimization factors are very crucial in determining a website’s rank. Analyze every dimension like the H1, H2 tags, the meta-tags, the LS1 keywords, content and the like. If you find that your competitor is weak in the content of their website, then this is your cue. You need to best your competitors in the aspect of content. If you find that your competitors are not rich in the multimedia that they use on their website, this is where you need to step in.
Conclusion:
Competition analysis is the best way to come up with strategies that will actually work to outrank your competitors and enhance the rankings of your website on the SERPs. Instead of just wasting your time in thinking about ways in which you might or might not be able to acquire a high rank, it is always advisable to perform competition analysis and get the exact details of what needs to be done and not just to scale the ranks. SEO is not complex once you understand it. But it has certain things that you must always keep at the back of your mind if you need to ace the game. Competition analysis happens to be just one of them.
